


Above this sceptred sway

by middlemarch



Series: Shadow Season 2 [4]
Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: American Civil War, Angst, Artists, Doctors & Physicians, F/M, Female Friendship, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Letters, Romance, Season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-16
Updated: 2017-02-19
Packaged: 2018-09-24 19:39:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 12,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9782309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: The presence of absence.





	1. “I know right from wrong”

**Author's Note:**

> This is my shadow season story for episode 4 "Southern Mercy." The title I chose is from Portia's speech on the quality of mercy. This is a series of expansions, deleted scenes and reconfigurations of the episode, chock-full of my own fanon ideas about the characters, so expect a lot of poetry, math, and art.

She did not remember the voyage. She remembered Jedediah’s face, his dark eyes looking at her with such warm encouragement and sorrow, his voice reciting the poem, the brief touch of his lips on her skin, the way it felt to hold his hand and have to let it go and the rest was missing until she’d awoken in the plain room with nurse Miss Dix sent sitting beside her, reading a small book, not the Bible. If it had been Jedediah next to her, he might have looked tired from a night spent in the unforgiving chair but the hand that lay on the counterpane would have been clasped in his and the smile she would have been given would have shadowed the sun. She had not been able to help thinking of him first and she had not been able to help the tears that filled her eyes when she recognized she was not in Alexandria, he was not going to knock on the door and enter before he was bidden, nor would Sister Isabella spent the afternoon telling her rosary with Mary’s permission to be relieved by the arrival of the Executive Officer and a slim volume of Dryden and his curated complaints of the day. Mrs. Garland had seen how she wept and was dabbing at her face with a dampened handkerchief before Mary could utter a word, had soothed her without the Southern accent Mary had grown accustomed to, “there now” repeated and not “hush.” She had been well-tended, bathed and her hair re-plaited, and dosed with a tonic and an infinitely more sustaining cup of tea but none of it changed the aching loneliness Mary knew she would carry with her until, unless she saw Jedediah again. She had wanted to turn her back on Mrs. Garland and cry into the thin pillow but the older woman had been wise and more kindly than she expected, reminding her, “He said he would come before long, my dear…and he seemed an impatient man,” making Mary smile and agree to take some broth when it was offered, try to rest when she could take no more. 

They had stayed four days at the boarding house before Cousin Agnes arrived after a flurry of telegrams whose expense Mary expected to be deplored the remainder of the journey home; she was to stay with her sister Caroline who had not been able to leave her little boys behind, a veritable regiment of tow-heads. Mary knew she had said she had nowhere to go but it hadn’t been the truth; anywhere away from Jedediah had seemed a desert, an expulsion from Eden for Eve alone. The few days in Washington City had been made of sleep and a childish hope to find him beside her when she woke, of tears she learned to save for the moonless night, of finding the pain in her head, her every joint, that studded her spine and filled her belly was somehow so much worse without his footstep on the threshold, his hand at her wrist, the dreams that patched the day to night more ruthless savagery except when they were the sweetest anguish—his arms around her, his voice in her ear telling her how he loved her, his finger under her chin, lifting it for his kiss after calling her _dearest_ or _Molly_ or _May_ , the most seductive, entrancing comfort that never came true. She did not grow stronger or not very much, but she didn’t weaken and she was able to sit in the chair by the window and look out into the street, to see people intent upon their business, the lines of buildings she didn’t know, the sky the same enameled blue lozenge in the pane. She was able to take up her pen and write to him,

> Dearest Friend,
> 
> I apologize for my delay in writing to let you know of my safe arrival in Washington City and for what I think you will find to be the stilted tone of this letter but I don’t know how else to begin and I hardly know how to go on. Mrs. Garland has cared for me well and the fever is at bay for now. I could not ask for better care ~~though I might hope for it~~. I cannot describe how it feels to be here, away from what is dearest to me, but I know that I can, I must bear it and that you should not leave Alexandria. Once, a long time ago now it seems to me, we argued about the War and I told you, how certain I was! that I knew right from wrong and you challenged me with such conviction, such fierce passion for justice that I could not fail to question myself; now I know again what is right, and that is for you to remain the physician par excellence at Mansion House and care for the men fighting to preserve this Union, to free the slaves, and even those who fight so that we may know our Cause is moral. You are capable of doing such good and I would be a hypocrite for criticizing you for your inaction towards the contraband if I allowed you to abandon all those who benefit from your skill, your immense talent and ability, because of my smaller need for your care. You have said it as much yourself when you spoke of your obligation and that has not changed with our distance. I thought I knew sacrifice when I came to Mansion House, and duty, and love and now I find I had known only one aspect, how easily I centered myself in each. I am not so good as you suppose, not half so good as I should like to be, but I am trying to be better, in every way, that when you may come to me I should be the woman you imagine. I would not have you believe any of this means I don’t wish for you and pray for you, for I do; I must tire the Lord himself with my pleas for your safety and your health and some hope of a future reunion, but I cannot help it. 
> 
> Before I left, I met a strange woman at Mansion House, a French artist, a vision I might have thought for her unexpected, unanticipated appearance and she helped me when my fever raged—I thanked her by sitting for a sketch at her request, though still she proved a greater consolation to me than I to her, I do believe. I have asked her to give you the picture she drew, an impertinence but one I think you will forgive. It is a serendipitous token for me to leave to you but there is another, one I intended once I knew he would not be dissuaded, a gift of my own design only, a book of poetry that has always been dear to my heart. Not the Tennyson I shared with my father or the Emerson or Thoreau you would have predicted, but a volume of Donne. He is not so widely read but I think if you are inclined, you may find some echo of my voice in his words, though his are far more purely beautiful than any I could say. The book is inscribed for you and it must be yours until some time when you may place it in my hand again or even better, sit beside me to read together while the evening falls around us. That day will come when God wills no matter how I might wish for it to be as soon as tomorrow. My cousin Agnes arrives shortly to escort me the rest of the way home to my sister’s in Boston, the address 9 Exeter Street if you would write to me. Is it the fever which makes me so wild, so bold, or only my own true nature which I should blush to acknowledge? I cannot say but I would ask you to write, however much you might. For I find I miss you so terribly, your wit and your secret gentleness, your passionate heart and your strength, that my soul longs for yours and if we must be parted, as we must be parted, I would find such consolation in whatever correspondence you might send. If I have asked too much, please forgive me and know I keep you in my prayers and beg God to keep you safe.
> 
> Ever yours,  
>  Mary von Olnhausen

The letter took the better part of an afternoon to compose, but Mary did not regret the time, the fatigue from sitting upright that boded ill for the upcoming train ride to Boston, even the ache in her head from the tears that threatened she would not let fall to perfume it with her grief. Mrs. Garland smiled a little when Mary asked for sealing wax and had provided it with a fresh cup of tea and a remark, 

“You shan’t be able to return to your position as Head Nurse, you understand. Miss Dix has certain…expectations, certain lines she will not allow crossed but I think you have made a good bargain. He did seem to care very much, if you will pardon the observation. Now will you have me read to you while you rest your eyes?”

Mary nodded. She had written so many words there hardly seemed any left to say but she thought of what might be a comfort as the night fell with Jedediah far away.

“The book of Ruth. Please.”


	2. “You defend him”

Anne was so shocked to find Byron criticizing her, she had not recognized it at first. She had told him as they walked down the empty hall and she had thought it was good McBurney insisted on his own room being placed elsewhere, even if his reason had been incomprehensible; his rectitude was immense even if applied indiscriminately and she would not fancy being thrown out into the street if their sole destination had been observed. It was late and she had availed herself of the arm Byron offered, a gentlemanly gesture he made regularly that she often mocked. He was not a wise man and not always kind, but he was sturdily present and he usually gratified her belief in herself, however clumsily—she expected praise for her choice and commiseration for the difficult position she had found herself in before he gloried in the increasing rift between the two senior officers or returned to his anatomy lessons. He had paused when she took a breath and interrupted her,

“You knew the whole time, Nan?” and she had not realized what he meant, had testily answered, 

“Yes, yes I did. As I was saying--”

“But you knew how ill she was—you nursed her yourself. You talked about it enough, for God’s sake. You knew what he meant to do and you didn’t say anything?”

She had seen then it would not be the night she wanted after the day she had loathed and felt that at the very least, they might conduct the conversation in the privacy of his room. Hers was cleaner and better appointed but she wanted to save it as a retreat if they argued and she could not bring herself sleep with him.

“Not here, Byron. Come along,” she’d hissed and he’d responded to her tone before her words, habituated to her orders in a way she both loved and despised. Surely, Jed Foster would never react to a woman, any woman, even Mary Phinney, that way, no matter what it cost him. 

In the bedroom, she tried to explain the situation but it seemed Byron cared most about the aspects she felt were least important.

“He said he was worried about the staff? And not himself?” he asked as he slipped off his coat and unbuttoned his vest, his hands reaching for her stays as she turned her back to him, her bodice and skirt already draped over the chair near his bureau.

“Yes, he seemed concerned about the spread of the disease,” she replied, enjoying the breath she could take without the corset’s buckram frame letting her know this far and no further.

“Absurd. Foster must have given him an earful,” Byron said, patting her pantaletted bottom softly enough that it wasn’t a slap before attending to his shirt’s buttons. He lifted his head in surprise when she went on, describing the chief’s subterfuge and her own struggle to confess to Foster.

“He truly said, ‘the deed will be done?’ As if he wasn’t casting out a sick woman, I know she’s not your favorite Nan, but you must admit, the Baroness’s heart has always been in the right place—seems our new chief can hardly be said to possess a heart. And Foster set such store by her—when you told him, how did you wait so long to do it?”

“I waited until the time was right, that’s all. I have only ever had our best interests in mind, Byron, and I’ll thank you to remember that!” she exclaimed, sitting heavily on the bed before sliding under the covers. The linen was not fresh but it held a familiar scent, much like the man behind her who had said nothing in response to her final declaration. She thought it was done, that she would only have to try to forget Jed Foster’s stricken expression when she’d told him, the softly anguished cry Mary had made in the nights when Anne sat vigil beside her, how her lip trembled when the man whose name she called was no where to be seen, only the nurse who had never liked her and whichever of her ghosts broke free from her dreams to follow her into the fever. But Anne had not considered Byron’s own version of chivalry, his elevation of loyalty above all, and his original and persistent fondness for Mary Phinney, even without the hoped-for provision of _spanferkel_. 

It was morning when he returned to it, a sunny day that might have been lovely; it was impossible to truly notice from within the hospital which held onto gloom like a lover. A smartly dressed officer walked through the ward as Byron prated on about how unfair it was for him to be forced through an academic examination and she let her eye wander to the stranger, something about the angle of his strong jaw familiar but unplaceable, until she heard Byron again blaming McBurney. There were undoubtedly grave deficits in their new chief, ones she hoped to turn to her purpose though she was becoming increasingly uneasy about her ability to do so, given the man’s erratic rigidity, his bizarre requests and injunctions, but his insistence on the written examination was the least of his issues and she could not resist saying as much, still obscurely insulted by Byron’s earlier tone,

“The major’s not to blame,” she said, hoping to quash him, watching his face but also looking for the figure of the unknown officer, his easy gait and furled cockade a welcome alternative to rumpled, complaining Byron.

“Certainly he is! And you defend him-- after he so callously sent poor Miss Phinney…” Byron began, returning to his theme of the night before, one she found a voice within herself echoed. Byron was the only one to speak to her about her role; Jed Foster had refused to say a word to her other than “scalpel” or “suture” since he’d come back from the dock, alone, any goodwill he’d had towards her for the chance to say goodbye dissipated with the actuality of having to let Mary go. Now there was a little silence from Byron and his tone changed as he spoke again,

“Oh, of course, of course. You hope to assume her position,” he said, as if he himself had not wanted Jed Foster’s promotion and connived unsuccessfully to get it. She hadn’t wished Mary gone as much as demoted, but she must work with the ingredients at hand, and she would be damned before she’d apologize for the ambition that might help them both.

“I resent that implication!”

“Still, Nan, you do stand to benefit from her misfortunes,” he replied. His tone was primarily self-satisfaction at his assessment of her motivations but she heard what was underneath, a righteous condemnation of her behavior that suggested her active collusion rather than the confused, powerless acquiescence she hated to recall. She was uncomfortable with the change in their relationship, accustomed to the superior position with Byron as supplicant, unwilling to accept she was in any way at his mercy.

“Miss Phinney succumbed to an illness, not a coup d’etat. She was the Head Nurse, not I- there was nothing I could do against the chief, Byron. And now her position must be filled and I am most fortunately here to take up her mantle. You needn’t make any more of it than that,” she replied firmly. She had not thought that even Mary’s absence would continue to define her as somehow lesser than the Yankee widow; she had not thought she would ever see herself that way and yet regret had taken hold in her heart, regret that she would not risk sharing with Byron.

“Oh,” he said. Not _yes_ , not _of course_ , not the eager Byron she’d had lapping at her feet since she arrived; he was speculative where he had been blind and she didn’t like it though she recognized she perhaps respected it.

“Therefore, my own advancement hangs in the balance, as does yours. I remain fully composed, as Miss Phinney would wish me to be. Major McBurney has his job to do and we must see he can do it. We have ours, the roles we deserve, not just what Summers left us with,” Anne said. She’d raised a question he hoped he wouldn’t address—what they deserved. The look that dashing, unknown officer had given her, Mary’s title, the ring Byron had mentioned once, oh, such a long time ago and then never again, such little things really but they ought to be _hers_ …Anne didn’t know what he might list except for his commission, not today.

“What if I lose mine, eh?” he asked. It seemed a simple query but there were too many questions to be answered, layered like the muscles he couldn’t name, and she couldn’t decide what they meant, that it was Byron who made such a complex inquiry. She sniffed and let him parse it as he would; her neck had begun to twinge dreadfully and McBurney was demanding something, soon, and from her.


	3. “What is she doing here?”

It had been the correct choice to leave Satterlee to come to Mansion House; the volume of injured men in Philadelphia had precluded her from accomplishing the work she had been engaged to do. She had found she needed a certain degree of space and light to rest her eye, the possibility if not the actuality of quiet, in order for her hands to obey her intention. She needed there to be such a heterogeneity of staff that she might not attract undue attention with her chalks and ink, the field easel, the loose linen smock that covered her dress to its hem. She was better suited to the former hotel, with its large windows bare of drapery, its chipped wainscoting and haphazard repurposing of an alcove into a medical inventory, a kitchen in the ward, than she had been to the more organized machine that was Satterlee. 

She would have come even if she had known Jedediah was here. He might not believe it, that she hadn’t known or that she would have come, but it was the truth. He had left abruptly, three years ago, but she had not noticed as much as he would have liked, still early in the affair with Xavier, those tumultuous, vivid days of passion, thought suspended unless she was in his arms or painting, her brush-strokes loosened by the exhaustion of love-making and the immersion in the novelty of the avocat’s mind, with its precise avenues and sense of control, so different from Jedediah’s imaginative brilliance, his inconsistent, puritanical morality, those young convictions of a young country. She was four years his junior but she had grasped he was the novice and she the master from their first encounter. The mistress, he would have said with the boyish grin she had been charmed by, and she would not have said it, but would have known he was wrong.

She thought she must be too curious a woman to be shocked. She had not flinched when Mary told her the name of the doctor she wished the sketch given to, had merely nodded and straightened the fraying silk ribbons tied under the chin of the sick woman, an unnecessary gesture they both understood, murmuring, “ _Adieu, madame_.” Mary’s departure had been one without precedent in Lisette’s experience, a rapid expulsion that had all the solemnity of the exile of a defeated, beloved queen. An assortment of staff, the hospital’s Matron and several nuns, the pretty dark-haired nurse in a dress too fine for the hospital, the stalwart African, a few of the healthier patients had all assembled to bid Mary farewell, some touching her hand lightly, the nuns making the sign of the cross and Lisette had wondered how Jedediah would have reacted if he had been present. What was between them? The woman, dark-eyed Mary, was lovely enough in her illness to have entranced Jed, whose keen eye for beauty had been an unexpected delight to Lisette, but that was not the quality that would have drawn him most. The way she had spoken in her delirium, a remarkable articulate urgency, and when she had come back to herself, her careful delicacy and then the fervent challenge she had posed to the pedantic, eccentric chief—those would have been her primary appeals to the Jedediah Foster Lisette knew. Mary had admitted she loved him with the words she chose and those she left unspoken, the transformation of the drawing into a gift, a message that though she had created it, Lisette could not pretend to translate, but that did not mean he returned her feelings with the same degree of ardor. If he did, the day’s events would be a tragedy for them both and if he did not, only for the woman whose death was wrapped around her like her rich paisley shawl. 

Lisette had stayed up late the night before, working on an illustration of a man’s hands. The right one had been badly injured but the left not at all, making an unusual composition where they lay folded on the blanket. They were more engrossing to draw than a face, less taxing, a worthy contribution to the book she was contracted for and she had needed the art to help her rest. The welcome pressure of the pen against her fingers, the feathery surface of the heavy paper and the faint shadows from the scattered fiber the candle illuminated were what she needed, what she had thought this trip would bring when she left Philadelphia. She slept late and did not bother with a formal coiffure, letting her braid fall over her shoulder, but she could not resist the vanity of a gold chain against the rose-colored dress, aware that she imagined Jed’s response to her and wanted it to be rueful, even if he would not express the emotion so others would see. He was across the hall with the English nurse who brayed at the healthier men and crooned to the dying and she thought he was not happy to see her, not all at, but they must meet and she must give him the drawing as Mary had wanted, regardless of how he might snarl. She recalled how fond she had been of him and let that color her voice when she greeted him,

“Hello, Jed.”

He was angry, that was evident, but it wasn’t all there was, though it was what he wished her to see and the appraising nurse next to him; she had displayed the traditional English disdain for a Frenchwoman since she had heard Lisette speak but she was not Jed’s friend, nor even an ally. Her posture said as much and the calculating gleam in her eye, the way she smoothed her hands over her apron and her wide hips.

“Mademoiselle,” he said curtly. Once he had uttered the title with the greatest pleasure, stretching out the syllables with the drawl she knew now was the Southern gentleman’s prerogative, muttering it between her breasts, against her slick thigh with the civility of an introduction at court, as if she were the only _mademoiselle_ worth knowing in all Paris. There was nothing left of that tone, a strange relief she regretted as she felt it.

“Please, I prefer Lisette,” she replied in lieu of reaching out her hand, of brushing a kiss against his cheek as an old friend might do. This was the man Mary loved, who would be so stern and contemptuous to his former lover, who looked exhausted though it was barely noon, who looked as old as he was and did not trouble to conceal it.

“And your preference is all that matters, as always. I prefer Dr. Foster,” he remarked swiftly, determined to chastise her, to establish the boundary between them, as if she had thrown herself into his arms with the suggestion of her Christian name. The English nurse smirked, her face falling into the lines so easily Lisette knew it was her habitual expression.

“I see you two have been previously acquainted. How…serendipitous you should meet again, that’s the word, isn’t it? I have duties to attend to, you must excuse me,” she said and did not wait for either of them to respond, pleased with her bon mot.

“Unusually, she’s right, Miss Hastings—this great War, so many hospitals, so many who must want your… services and you show up at this one. In all the world, here you are,” he said. Lisette could not blame him though it was not what he thought. She had not come here for him. She might have observed she could not have expected him to have joined the army, the Union Army, she would not allow herself to react like to the veiled insult when she had made out the most important word almost by chance, you. Here you are and not her, not the one he wanted, the woman whose eyes had softened to speak of him, without even saying his name. She must say something though and he had given her the idea, the memory of the badinage he’d once enjoyed and the slight she might give him without an injury.

“Imagine my surprise, _cher docteur_. Or, I should said, _capitaine_ , _n’est-ce pas_? Had I known you’d be here, I would have brought the coat you left on my hook. You needn’t go without, it can be cold here as in Paris,” she said lightly, letting an edge into her voice with her accent, reminding him of who she had been while she watched to see who he had become.

“I’ve managed. It was three years ago—a lifetime since the War. I’ve not felt the lack,” he replied. He meant to be cutting but the truth of what he said, the undercurrent of what, who he did miss, made her feel his despair more than anything.

“You’re married, I understand?” she asked. Mary had indicated that with her oblique response and why wouldn’t he be? He had been a man of appetites but with an American’s concern for propriety, had spoken of his family and their expectations. He had never asked her and she had not said a word to suggest she would give up her art, her country, her very self to accompany him back to his home, but she had gleaned it was a hope disappointed from the way he had shouted “He’ll never marry you!” before he slammed her door, not waiting to hear her say she had never expected that of the Comte or any other man, nor desired it. 

“Yes. She is like the wife of most officers, at home, praying for the War to end. Our arrangement is a much contented one,” he answered. She did not think he was aware of how well she remembered him, her skills in translation. He had not seen her art in several years and he could not know how much more she was capable of since they had parted.

“Forgive me, that’s an interesting choice of words, don’t you think?” she replied, raising an eyebrow, smiling to suggest she was not a threat.

“Contented?” he said. He had never learned how to conceal all he felt. He’d never had cause but she had and it served her well.

“ _Arrangement_ ,” she countered in French, explicitly giving the word its full connotation. 

“I thought you preferred that term. That you more comfortable with it—since you have demanded your preference be primary,” he replied. How much he wanted to be furious with her but he couldn’t convince either of them. She pitied him.

“Quite a chaotic morning, no?” she offered, an excuse, an explanation, a kindness if he could see it.

“And we suffer the lack of our Head Nurse,” he said. He suffered, a pain he was crippled by, beyond his skills to heal, a doctor and not a nurse, not a woman with her familiarity with what the word _endurance_ truly meant.

“I’ve met her. Before she left, we sat together a while. She was quite ill I thought, I did not understand why she would be sent…away. She did not seem to want to go,” she said, pausing to let him imagine them together, Mary in her sickbed, what they might have spoken of. 

His eyes were darker than she recalled and there was something in them she had never seen before, a hopeless, mute anguish Mary had given voice to before she left. Lisette had made a promise to Mary and she owed Jedediah something for how things had ended between them. 

“She wanted you to have this,” she said simply, holding out the drawing she had made, that Mary had thought to leave behind for the man she loved. He took it and was silent. It was a sort of quiet they had never shared before and she would have to consider what it meant. He was not the man she had known.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Satterlee General Hospital, which existed from 1862 to 1865 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was the largest Union Army hospital during the Civil War. In the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg, thousands of Union soldiers and Confederate prisoners were treated at Satterlee. Founded in 1862 by order of Surgeon-General William Alexander Hammond, the hospital was built in the sparsely developed West Philadelphia neighborhood near the intersection of 42nd Street and Baltimore Avenue. Its 15-acre grounds ran north to 45th and Pine Streets. It was the second-largest hospital in the country and the largest Union hospital during the Civil War, with 34 wards and hundreds of tents containing 4,500 beds.


	4. “Is the objective the right one?”

Was someone sitting beside Mary as the young soldier sat beside his comrade a floor below? She looked up at him from the drawing Lisette had made and he wished for impossible things-- to be transfigured into pen and ink that he might step inside the sketch to take her hand and watch her slow, sunny smile return, to go to her since he had not been able to keep his promise that she might stay with him, to live a life missing the dimension that brought her fever, Eliza, the War, gladness following joy, with a sepia wash bringing the only depth they needed. He had never seen the expression Lisette captured. It was a look between women, an intimacy that perhaps he would never share with her, even if, when they were reunited and he could not decide how he felt to see it. She had wanted him to, that must be enough, and knowing that she had wanted it so much she had told a stranger what he had made it so difficult for her to tell him. Would she accept an apology from him? If he ignored her letter and went to her in Boston, would she be angry or relieved? He could not offer himself yet, the divorce not finalized though apparently in the penultimate stage, and to go to her and still be required to hold back was a cruelty he could not inflict upon either of them. He told himself that and tried to believe it, remembered the way she would say his name and how she had felt in his arms before she fell ill. There was a knock at the door and he quickly put the drawing under some other papers, unwilling that anyone would know that it existed.

“Enter,” he said shortly. If it were Henry Hopkins or Samuel, he would be pleasantly surprised, but he would have preferred to be alone. The door opened and he saw Lisette’s rose colored dress, so ill-suited to the hospital, the light on the gold chain she’d hung around her neck. He turned his back on her and faced his desk. She walked into the room instead of retreating.

“Is that a Beck Brothers microscope?” she asked as if there had never been anything between them, as if any woman would have recognized the most modern microscope currently available. Mary’s Baron had been a chemist—would she have known anything of microscopy, enough to let the appreciation of such a fine instrument warm her voice?

“Been in the box for two weeks. Like a toy on Christmas morning. This patient’s case presents an opportunity to finally unwrap it, to practice medicine properly,” he explained. If he only spoke of the most obvious facts, she might leave. He could not decide how he felt to see her within Mansion House, so much the same as when he had left her in Paris, as if the years apart had only refined slightly what she had been. Her eyes—he had forgotten their unusual color, a grey that somehow spoke of gold, and the ineffable Frenchness she had, a remoteness he could never breach that she carried like grace.

“I worked with a similar one in Geneva. I was asked to develop a method for photographing the slides. The work was quite intriguing. I see you intend to examine the sputum,” she replied. He hummed an agreement.

“I can prepare a suitable diatom to help you calibrate it, you know. It’s no trouble,” she offered.

“If you wish,” he said and she exhaled, a breath like a sigh.

“I think we may have gotten off, _comment dit-on_ , on the wrong limb, you know, badly. I had not wanted that, Jedediah,” she said. The way she put it reminded him of how the men would talk about their amputations, the phantom limb whose sensation tormented them, for which there was no recourse.

“It’s hard to say what would be the right…limb, for us,” he replied. 

“You are still angry about the Earl,” she suggested, continuing to prepare the slide.

“I thought he was a Count, but you would know better than I, just how noble a _comte_ he was, what station you aspired to,” he retorted, letting the old sting of the rejection replace the grief at losing Mary, the deep, corrosive hatred he felt toward McBurney, the unequivocal sense he had that his world had broken and could not be mended.

“We are not children, Jedediah. You knew who I was. There were no secrets between us,” Lisette said evenly.

“Weren’t there? In truth, I thought you had changed during those few months,” he said. Perhaps she had not intended to keep secrets but she had not told him everything. There was always some part of her that he could not touch, though it had seemed she cared for him.

“Well, I might have had you asked but you didn’t know how. To ask for what you want. Have you learned—has your arrangement taught you that? Or something else?” she said, standing beside him, so close he could smell the jasmine and chalk that meant Lisette. He lifted his head from the microscope to regard her.

“I suppose you may think so, if you knew, if you must know, we’re divorcing. A mutual request, the only thing we seem to agree upon. Dissolution by telegraph, it’s all very modern, quarrelling in Morse code,” he explained. She nodded and her scent was even stronger around him. It was all he would tell her—something else, _someone_ else was not something he would willingly discuss with her. She had seen something, he thought, the hours she sat with Mary and that was all he wanted her to know. A secret between them, one he wanted to keep.

“And Madame von Olnhausen, the delirious Baroness with the dark eyes? The Head Nurse the hospital misses--you were close?” she inquired, using Mary’s correct title and name, pronouncing the word hospital so they both knew what she meant.

“It’s complicated,” he said. 

“She said the same,” Lisette replied. What else had Mary said? Lisette was right—he had not learned to ask, not well enough. If he had asked Mary, if he had spoken to her as he said they would, might they have found a way for her to stay, to be near? He found he did not want to speak of Mary with Lisette, for all that he yearned to know what the women had discussed, how she had sounded. He thought she would tell him he already knew what he needed, from her letter and the Donne she had left for him, the mathematics texts Sister Isabella had not imagined could be Mary’s which he’d found on his desk, the drawing Lisette had midwifed into being.

“Our arrangement was a professional one,” he added, unsure why he would attempt to conceal from Lisette what they both were aware she knew, how Mary cared and how he did, but it was a sort of truth. The arrangement between then was professional, they were colleagues; the attachment between them was personal, compelling, irresistible, precious. 

“There’s that word again,” she remarked. “I’m not sure…Is the objective the right one?” she said, tilting her head towards the microscope, lowering her lashes to obscure her intent.

“Yes. This does clarify things,” he said. Mary would have laughed, murmuring _It does, does it?_ She had asked for him to write and now he must decide what to tell her. Lisette, in her pretty rose gown, her cheeks pink with health, he needn’t.

“Shall I prepare the specimen, Jedediah?”

“Thank you, Mademoiselle…Lisette, but I think, I can manage better alone,” he said. She slipped from the room and he uncovered her picture of Mary, thought of the paper beneath his hand, the way the ink would come from the pen like a thread, a suture for the wound between them, how he would not use her name but only begin _Dearest Friend, I have waited too long to write, mea culpa, carissime…_


	5. “Is there a cure?”

Jedediah was a mediocre liar. She had known worse. Men who lied with such little skill the most gullible fool could not be taken in, men who made only a negligible effort with the words they chose but thought to distract with a rakish glance, a smile, the heat of their palms most carefully applied, men who lied with ease but so often even they could not tell what was true, rendering the deception meaningless—Jed Foster was none of these. When they had first started their _affaire de coeur_ , he had been painfully honest, had considered it the most important virtue, critical to a man’s honor and a lady’s reputation. When she pointed out she was neither and so placed a lesser value on honesty, he’d been genuinely shocked and she had not been able to resist kissing his open mouth deeply and provocatively; with his head on her bare breast a libidinous hour later, she had explained what mattered most to her was the choice, the ability to lie and the rationale behind the decision, intention coloring the action. He had not been convinced but the intervening years had taught him something she had not been able to. She was curious what it had been or who that had altered him, allowing him to work under the authority of a chief he despised, to say he did not miss his home, the bay he had remembered with the eye of an inquisitive child, the heart of the poet he would not allow himself to be, the color of the sky behind the cabins, the thousand, mysterious greens of a tobacco field in bloom.

She drew as she considered him, the tableau one she had not intended but could not forgo, the two young soldiers reminding her of Achilles and Patroclus, except that the one seated was so young, so finely made, the skin beneath the battle’s filth so smooth and unmarred it disturbed her. So it had been with the nurse, Mary in her muslin nightdress, her chestnut curls weighted by their length, darkened with sweat. The sheen of the fever on her fair face was a challenge to recreate, the bare skin of her throat and chest, her dark eyes still dreamy but somehow sadder than when she sought the vision of her dead father. Lisette had come to the hospital to draw tendon and bone, the plump coil of exposed viscera in the cracked shell of a bayonetted belly, the clavicle carved by stridor, the ridge of the spine dusted with gunpowder, sclera like an egg’s white as the soul fled with the last breath, but she found portraits she was compelled to render that she could never use for the book. Mary had mentioned briefly, before a coughing fit, that she sketched a little, like any properly brought up young lady, and Lisette wondered how Mary would have drawn Lisette now. Should her braid would have lain over her shoulder like a tassel, her cheekbones angled to suggest intelligence or a vixenish cunning, what sort of woman would she have been in the eye of the Baroness? And if she had known Lisette was the former mistress of the man she loved, what then? Would her eyes have been shaded with spite or sorrow, would she have been seen as an enemy or friend or a veteran?

Why had he lied about his marriage? About how he loved Mary? She could not decide which question interested her more, whether it was one question of two. Her hand continued to move across the paper, the light and shadow on Ames’s face taking shape on her page but not yet the explanation for the closeness between the boys, a frisson stirring her when she tried to resolve it. Jedediah she should understand better. She had known him well once, that younger version of the short-tempered surgeon who strode through the halls of this hospital, how he laughed and when he needed to be soothed, how he enjoyed the sight of his hands on her flesh, the contrast of how they were made. He had loved the body then and so had she, his and hers, the ones she drew, the ones she touched with inky fingers, how the sweet oil tasted amid the curls on his chest, how peacefully he could sleep when there was a storm and she watched the rain in a dressing gown. She suspected she was the only woman who knew these things—the wife he was rejecting he had dismissed easily as if she had never been an intimate and there was an undeniable restraint in the way he spoke of Mary von Olnhausen, a reverence she thought the woman herself would wave off. Was Jedediah the sleeping soldier in the bed or the one sitting vigil? Aimes looked over at her then and Lisette saw the private recognized something in her she could not articulate, even as it dawned on her what the secret was.

Jed lied because he could not bear the truth and told the truth because he could not accept the lie. There was a fearful darkness in him now, pain that she could not help him with but which she realized Mary had, had known and consoled. He had wept before the Yankee widow as he never had with her and had allowed his tears to be dried. He had made her promises it broke his heart not to keep. He had hidden the picture Lisette gave him, but not well; his eyes strayed to it while they spoke in his study and she thought he had not wanted her in her rose-colored dress at his door but had had a mad hope to see Mary in her demure chignon and grey calico, though he had spent the hour before he slept praying on his knees for her safe arrival in Boston. Aimes leaned over and kissed the boy in the bed, forgetting where they were or not caring and in the moment before the men started shouting, Lisette saw she had captured it somehow in the drawing, that tender love and loyalty, just as she had Mary’s abiding affection filling the space around the figure in the bed like the Holy Spirit it was difficult to believe in and indispensable nonetheless. Lisette tucked the new sketch away and stood, raising her own voice to attract Jedediah’s attention to Aimes’s plight; neither of them were ready to see it yet.


	6. “That is not what Dr. Foster is saying”

Oh, he was a fool! They’d all been right, his mother and Eliza, now Lisette indirectly remonstrating him as she spoke to Aimes, to Camilla whom they had threatened into sincerity between them. The only voice he did not hear castigating him was hers, Mary’s contralto patient, impatient, firm, consoling. She had once accused him of hiding, of refusing to see, but never of stupidity, of the gross lack of judgment he so despised in others. If she stood across from him as Lisette did and he confessed his realization, she would have been charitable or merry with her refutation, brisk if she had concerns about the corporal in the third bed. But his folly meant she was not here, not waiting for him in a bed upstairs or in a sparely furnished room in a rented house three streets over and it was one more thing she did not know.

He had simply accepted her reason for coming to Mansion House “to be of some use” and hadn’t pressed her for any other detail of her prior life. He had thought he was showing her the deference due any gentlewoman, which he had withheld upon her arrival. Then he had mocked her and assigned her the most degrading tasks he could imagine, not expecting to see her self-aware smile as she washed the filthy feet of the old campaigner, a studied neutrality when she brought water to the enemy combatants and dressed their wounds. Why hadn’t he asked her, some night when they sat in the parlor alone or overlooked the back garden from the veranda, what she had left and why? Was it what Camilla Aimes explained _I saw my chance to get away and do some good, so I took it_ and if so, what was Mary fleeing? She had been the widow of a good man, clearly busy with the Freedman’s Society and her church. There must have been a house with clean curtains and a writing desk where she stacked her mathematics texts, where the picture of her husband had been sentinel and guardian, relatives to call upon and tend—and yet she had thrown it all over and presented herself to Miss Dix, glad to be told she was plain enough to serve, dauntless enough to try to stop the wild-eyed soldier who’d threatened the ward, threatened him as soon as she’d walked through the doors of the hospital. Had she wanted to get away or had she sought something—and seeking, had she found it? Lisette, with her anatomist’s eye, her womanly intuition, her ability to suspend judgment and only see, would likely have an answer and he might have as well, if he had asked and shown he would listen to the answer she gave.

Danny did not know Aimes’s secret. Jed understood this and felt sure Hale would agree if he could be made to understand the question; the young man would not have imagined someone would sacrifice so much of themself for companionship, for respect, and he would not have wanted to. Camilla had not had a difficult task, to fool her fellow-soldier, the man she would turn chameleon for and with such joyful abandon, and it had not been very hard for Mary to do the same except when she felt it was beneath them both. Lisette pressed on, insisting on the truth no matter how it cost the young woman to have it said aloud _you are in love with him_ , a construction that could never be painless as it had not been between the two lovers, the shy, tender _I am in love with you_ or the alternative, _You are in love with me_ , perhaps confident, perhaps startled with the emergence of gladness like the subtle loveliness of a white lilac’s fragrance drifting from the garden. Mary would not have been as cruel as Lisette, but she had lost a man she loved very dearly before she had come to the War and she was more familiar with the way grief clung like autumn’s wood-smoke, the ache of words that had been uttered and captured by another’s ear.

_You must tell him_ the Frenchwoman said, as if it were not the hardest task in the world, the greatest risk. If he had asked her as she had described, convinced her to marry him, they would not be standing here now; he would be in Paris perhaps, the lecturer and not the student, and if he had experimented with the needle, she would not have brought him back. Weakness she saw and would conquer; she would not console. She was graceful, cordial but never soft and her forgiveness was never indulgent. When he had told Mary to wait, that they would speak later, when there was time, when she was well, when he was ready and not before, she had not argued. She’d closed her eyes, he remembered that, and when she opened him, he’d seen the acceptance. He recognized what Camilla said _I wouldn’t want to distress him_ because he had thought it himself, _He might not make it through the night_ more direct than the fleeting, consuming terror he’d had when he thought Mary would seize in the bed, in his arms before he could get her into the tub. He had not known what it would feel like to see her blood on his handkerchief when she coughed and hoped he had hidden his expression from her. And now Lisette allowed no dissent when she said _All the more reason_ , all the more, this much and nothing more was what Mary was owed by him. _Regret_ , that was the word she chose, but it was not the right one and it was not because English was not her mother tongue, but because she had never loved someone the way she recognized Aimes had, that he did, though she recognized she was not speaking only to the young girl in her Union blue, her woman’s breasts dressed like a wound. 

_As long as you live_ , Lisette pronounced, nothing like the minister who had bound him to Eliza. She sounded like a witch, a sybil, a troubadour and she could not know how close oblivion was for him. Since the War had changed him and then Mary more so, he was not the compassionate doctor his mistress remembered, more curious than anything else; he had learned there were things that were intolerable alone and that the morphine would never leave him, beckoning him as humbly as a servant, as proudly as a duchess. Mary had not broken the syringe but she had wanted to. As long as you both shall live—how long could that be? If Mary died in Boston, waiting for him to come, expecting him when the door opened and walking through it without him, he would not last a moment before he found the needle and the lovely death it held. He would not tell even Samuel Diggs and he would risk hellfire and damnation to leave the world she had stepped from. 

Mary would not have allowed him any of this. She would have stopped him with a look, a word, a palm to his cheek. She would have kissed his mouth with her own and drawn his face to hers with both hands. She would have read him anything, Psalms or ghazals, her favorite Gauss, incomprehensible Euler, Dickens, Schiller, Goethe, the Gross’s military surgical manual, her own letters and he would have blinked, held up a hand, made love to her, until she nodded her approval or cried out his name. “Answer not a fool according to his folly,” she would have told him and smiled before she left to sleep, to work, to return to him. Jed felt the sunlight on his face and the coolness of shadow his body made behind him. He did not interrupt Lisette as she took Camilla Aimes by the arm and showed her the white dress, so much plainer than Victoria’s but intended for the same purpose.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gross's Military Surgery Manual was written in 1862. Jed imagines Mary quoting Proverbs 26:5. Euler and Gauss are Mary's two favorite mathematicians if you follow my fanon Mary. A ghazal is a form of Persian poetry.


	7. “…what I saw”

If only the man had held a knife to Emma’s throat, Henry knew he would be able to sleep. If only Emma had gasped at the feeling of another man’s arm around her waist, Henry would not have to know how it felt to lose his mind with his soul. She thought he was silent because she had done something. He loved a beautiful girl who could still imagine herself at fault when the fault was so clearly his alone. The thoughts tumbled through his mind as he sat on the damp earth, with Emma in front of him.

“Henry, he had a gun,” she said. 

The shot had split the night apart. He had been holding Emma, her slim body pressed against his. All her black silk hair brushed against his hands. Her mouth had been sweet and warm and she clung to him. The day had been a victory, glory and duty united, and the night was a blessing, dark enough to hide them, the moon bright enough to paint Emma’s face with silver. The dead man’s face had had the same moonlight on it and then the light drowned with the man in the creek.

“And then he didn’t,” he said. 

He hadn’t thought—had he? when he turned and strode towards the sniper, meeting him in the water. There had been time for thought, more than on the battlefield when the Rebels had started shooting again, only stopped by Emma’s confidence in the sacred honor due a Southern woman. If only the man had had a knife, he could have cut him. The weapon would have borne some of the guilt. But he had used his hands and the water, to strangle the man and drown him, a double death. Those eyes in the pale face had stared at him as the miracle God wrought became unbutchered meat in his hands. Emma had not made a sound. He could never touch her again.

She seemed more distressed when he vomited onto the grass than by the murder. It was no battle; he had slaughtered his brother and there was no way to make it anything other than that. She tore her petticoat to have something to wipe his mouth when he retched bile and she led him away from the mess he had made. He followed her because she would have stroked his face if he had not and he could not allow himself to know if he would still thrill to her touch. 

“Henry, it’s War. You saved me, you don’t need to reproach yourself. Henry. Please. Listen to me. Henry,” she said and she was begging him and scolding him. Emma. Her name had once meant everything.

His body shivered and he thought his soul could not bear the flesh that housed it. An hour ago, two, he had held her with reverence and then had destroyed a man. He might have destroyed her with his desire and that he could think it shamed him. To forget the man with no name but Haunting, to consider how he had wanted to kiss not only her red mouth but her white breasts, to lift her skirt and seek his satisfaction in her honor, her skin, where she was so sweetly cleft for him, revealed the self he had not been able to alter. A madman, a fiend, a beast and she had seen it and was not repulsed. Her voice was not soothing to him, the drawl too liquid, his name almost slurred _Henry_ and he turned his face from her. He was corrupt and beyond redemption. When he dreamt and it was her face in the water or his own, he woke weeping to have forgotten the face of the man he murdered. Abel. Haunting.

If only he had had a knife.


	8. “…about Miss Phinney’s departure.”

“Dr. Foster. How do you do?” Charlotte Jenkins asked civilly. She hid her suspicion well and he thought he would not have seen it if he hadn’t been looking for the expression in her eyes, the slight tension in her shoulders that hadn’t been there when she was helping the older man on the pallet. She might have smiled at Mary but not at him.

“Well enough,” he said, feeling the weight of the books under his arm, the tail of the twine he’d used to tie them together. Charlotte Jenkins had organized her camp hospital with the skill of an experienced administrator but was sufficiently pleasant in her manner that the patients, the healthier contraband who worked under her command had an air of security and equanamity that Mansion House had never acquired, even during the brief period when he had been the Chief and Mary the Head Nurse. Under McBurney, the hospital was disorderly and rigid and there was a constant underlying sense of wrongness that was not discussed but could not be dispelled.

“We don’t much stand on ceremony here, Dr. Foster. Is there something I can do for you?” Charlotte said.

“Rather the opposite, I’d hoped,” he replied.

“Yes?” she said evenly. If she played chess, she would likely best him. If she did not, someone should teach her, if she would spare the time.

“Before she fell ill, I had spoken with Mar—Nurse Phinney about seeing the patients here. I had thought, if you still wished it, I might make rounds here,” he explained, fumbling over Mary’s name in a way he knew Charlotte would not have missed.

“We could certainly use your expertise. Mr. Diggs does what he can, but the hospital’s best physician, well, that would be a gift,” she said.

“No, not a gift. It’s what is owed, my duty. What I ought to have done before,” he said seriously, unable to make out exactly why she smiled now. She was a beautiful woman and he had never seen that before.

“Is that a gift then?” Charlotte said, gesturing at the books, not remarking on the rest of what he had said but perhaps approving of it.

“Of a sort. Mar—Nurse Phinney’s depature was…hurried, I think you may be aware of that, and some of her things were left behind. The nuns, Sister Isabella did not believe these belonged to her, thought she’d borrowed them from me but they are hers. And I think she would like them to be yours, for your school,” he said, holding out the books. He’d brought the Hewlett translation of Euler’s _Elements of Algebra_ and an edition of Euclid’s _Elements_. The Gauss was in Latin and Mary had annotated it so thoroughly, he couldn’t find it within himself to let another set of eyes review her comments. It sat beside his bed now and he tried to read some every night, unable to understand the mathematics but with a growing sense of Mary’s mind and just who it was he might lose.

“Are you sure? She did write to the Freedman’s Society about needing a school here, for the children and the grown folks, but maybe you ought to send them back to her. She’s up in Boston I heard?” Charlotte said, not taking the books from his outstretched hands.

“Yes. You should—I feel confident she would want you to have them. To keep them until she returns. She will return. She likes usefulness,” he said and it satisfied Charlotte enough to accept the gift, open the cover and look at the inscription.

“These are hers? The name here, it’s Mary von Olnhausen. And you, all of you, call her Miss Phinney. Yet she signed her letters to the Freedman Society with this name,” Charlotte said. Her tone was not quizzical but he knew he was being evaluated.

“Yes, they’re hers. As to her name, I can’t recall exactly, save that she didn’t want to be called Baroness,” he said. Those first days, when they had all sought to humiliate her into leaving, when they hadn’t noticed how firmly she tied her apron strings, they had all shouted for the Baroness, _liebe Baronin_! and then suddenly she was Nurse Phinney standing next to the Chaplain, in her kitchen, insisting the laundresses be given more lye. Nurse Phinney then Nurse Mary writing letters, spooning broth, singing a boy’s favorite hymn while Chaplain Hopkins stood beside her like an oak.

“Did she like it? Being Nurse Mary? She’s a widow, I’d have thought she’d want her husband’s name remembered. People set a great store on names—and who gives them,” Charlotte said. They had spoken of it a little, when he had asked forgiveness with his permission to call her Mary, but not of her surname. To lose that or have to taken from her would have hurt. To sacrifice it herself would have been a different pain. He thought how it felt to hear his Christian name in her voice, to be recognized, how Lisette had referred to her as the Baroness and drawn her in her bed like a princess, how Mary had signed the letter where she said how she cared for him as Mary von Olnhausen and _yours_. 

“Yes, Miss Jenkins. Shall we see the patients now? I would suggest starting with those most afflicted but this is not my ward,” he said. Charlotte put the books down on a table that seemed to be her clearinghouse but very gently, then turned back to him.

“Seems about as good a plan as any. Mind you thank Mary for me when you write her,” she said, then pointed to a man who could be twenty or eighty. “This is Jerome…”


	9. “If you allow me to go with you”

Mary would know how to listen even if she did not know what to say. Mary, not Nurse Mary or Miss Mary or the Baroness von Olnhausen; Mary, a woman who kept her own counsel, who saw something in Emma she had not known to look for herself even though Belinda had been hinting for years. It seemed unfair to miss her for her response, when she had been devastated to be sent away, so desperately ill. Dr. Foster had proven his reputation as an exceptionally gifted physician in her care but it was not the Head Nurse he treated but Mary and still, she had suffered terribly. Emma had seen Dr. Foster’s face when she came in the room to sit with Mary, how he had run out of prayers other than her name. He was another man from the one who had teased and mocked. He looked old, drawn though his dark beard concealed some of his torment. There was nothing for his eyes, his furrowed brow, the way he held Mary’s hand between both of his. Emma was young but she knew enough not to tell him how Mary cried for him in the night and stopped herself, her swallowed tears making her cough until she spat blood into a handkerchief or towel, whatever cloth Emma could lay her hands up. She knew not to tell him Mary had pleaded with her not to say anything except for the times when her fever spiked and she was without restraint, begging his pardon for some argument they’d had, exhorting him not to unlock the door if he was not ready, gasping _I want please Jedediah I want you_ like an abandoned child, like a wife who had married for love. Mary understood secrets and Emma did, when to keep them and how close.

She might have told Mary what had happened. How she had refused to let Henry go to the battlefield without her and how as they had ridden on the wagon, she had pretended they were newly wed and paying a call to a neighbor or a sick parishioner. She had let herself imagine Henry winking at her when he saw the sweetcakes had not risen and that she had brought along the last jar of calf’s-foot jelly, holding the reins in one hand that he might take her gloved hand in his. They had arrived at Ayres’ farm and found mayhem, worse than they expected because neither of them knew much of War, not really, for all the boys they’d tended and soothed that they were _safe now, never you mind_. There was a rambling low stone wall and boys strewn in the grass as if the earth had choked them back from their graves. It was loud and yet so many of the crumpled shapes were silent. There had been a mad rush, a torturously slow procession to get the soldiers into the wagons she’d bought with stolen Confederate money and then Henry had run into the field and she thought he would die. Before she could stop him, while her face was turned away, he’d be lost. She stood on the wall and felt the Rebels recognize her hair, blowing like a black flag, her billowing green skirt darker than the crushed meadow daubed with clotting blood, before she flew to Henry’s side.

Mary would have nodded to hear the wagons had been sent on and they’d been left behind to the night, the rushing creek, and a confession. She would not have interrupted if Emma stumbled in the recounting of how the moment had tipped, faster than he had said her name, lasting forever, and she would not have asked any questions Emma did not want to answer. She might have paused before she went on and in the unblushing quiet of women together, remembered the infinite, exhilarating pitch of her yearning, the relief of feeling his perfect mouth perfect on hers and his rough cheek and the way a tender, carnal love she’d never known had taken her, urging her to him, eager to breathe him in and tasting him instead, winding her arms around his neck and drawing him to her. She had wanted his weight upon her with more intensity than she had wanted to withdraw from Frank’s caresses. She had understood suddenly all the strictures placed on young girls to protect their virtue and how worthless they were; she would have raised her skirts herself, unbuttoned her bodice and unhooked her stays, lain back in the leaf meal and let him stroke her parted white thighs against the uneven black of the moss. She would have given, taken, taken, oh been taken because she was want and desire and love and he was Henry. There was no risk, except that she would not feel his heart beating against hers. She could not be wanton if he looked at her with devotion and such a passionate, singular appetite. Consummation had been inevitable and cherished. She had expected to hear him say her name in her ear, an inquiry, endearment, promise, and plea. She would have said _yes Henry oh yes yes_ as his hand moved to her waist, her hip, as he started to say _my, mine, my-Emma_ and the bullet hit the tree like a falcon screaming. And then she would have told Mary how he had let her go and become another man.

She had not known paralysis could still allow her to raise a hand to her mouth, that she would not know whether to breathe in or out. She had not thought she could be a witness. She had known that there were monsters in the world but not when she would find them. It had taken so long for the man to die and Henry tripped in the water returning to the bank, his clothes soaked, his eyes blind. The sound of him vomiting had been the first part that was familiar but his skin was wet with the fresh water of the creek and not a fever’s sweat. He had barely spoken, just enough that she knew he had not gone mad. Mary would have tilted her head when Emma explained how she had tried to calm him and how he had refused her, the silence he had used to fill in every fracture. And Mary would have refrained from uttering a word when Emma said how angry she had been with him, even though she knew she shouldn’t be. That he had expected to be a hero and a savior, that he had not understood it was a war, that there would be filth and sin and such rending destruction, that he had been a boy and not a man. She had already known he was a killer.

He had wanted to do something real, more real than prayer or bathing the dead, but he hadn’t wanted to do all of it. Would he have left her gasping in unfulfilled desire and her chemise, to be shamed by the withdrawal? The soldier, a Confederate, had wanted them dead or at least Henry—she was not so sure she would have been treated with the same respect the daylight had bestowed upon her but she’d known not to say it. He had wanted to be a soldier and had found he wanted to desert. He had deserted her and she was furious but she would not leave him, not as he left her. She had given him all of herself, though he wouldn’t take her and it was an action that could not be undone any more than he could bring the dead man back to life and take away the way he had rushed to attack him. He could not bear his own hands and they were all he had to use.

“That’s all, Mary,” she would have said and the Yankee nurse would have said, “Yes. It must be.” And the silence between them would have been rich with what Mary needn’t say and Emma needn’t hear.


	10. “No one will know”

Samuel Diggs had never received a letter before. Before he left Philadelphia, there’d been no cause. He saw daily all those who mattered most to him and had been too busy to consider how Dr. Berenson wrote to colleagues, reviews of journal articles, the various societies that had allowed a Hebrew membership. Once Samuel had arrived in Alexandria, he had realized there would be nothing coming for him. There were not many he cared about who had enough skill with writing to undertake the endeavor and what they might see as the waste of the postage. Samuel would know he was kept in their fervent prayers, that they worked hard and enjoyed Auntie’s pie when the soft fruit was available, that whatever they would have told him would wait until they met again, in this world or the next. Sometimes, Samuel thought Heaven would be nothing but jawing and cracking jokes and that he might prefer the Papists’ limbo if it were quiet enough to read.

No one brought the letter to him. That wasn’t how it worked at Mansion House. Samuel Diggs was the one who fetched, who carried this basket and that crate, invisible to most except when they expected him right there, boy. He was the general accessory, unremarked, necessary like light or air, appreciated in his absence. Summers had said as much when he left and the old doctor had meant it kindly. If Samuel meant to become present, he had to take great care and make sure he could find a way to hide, to be noticed and unnoticed. Charlotte understood as Aurelia, though he loved her still, would not and her comprehension contained the feeling that was too resigned to be rage, keeping it from rotting him like water seeped into a beam.

He’d found the sealed envelope after he left Dr. Hale’s autopsy. It hadn’t occurred to the officer to ask Samuel to write up the report, though Samuel suspected the description would be confused and muddled, misspelled and blotted, easy to reject. Miss Hastings would probably edit it before Hale submitted the paper to a journal and her name would not appear anywhere on the document. She was a hard woman to pity, so Samuel didn’t try. She got what she wanted enough of the time, Nurse Mary finally cast out and that interloper with the polished buttons sniffing round her skirts, Dr. Hale tucked away with the husk of the man that was left after they had taken it apart.

Samuel didn’t have a place of his own to sleep but he had found a series of corners and alcoves where he was unlikely to be interrupted. Since she had fallen ill, no one had used the closet Nurse Mary set aside for her treatment of the prostitutes and it had a chair and a lamp, a small window high up. When she had been well, there had been a chipped jug with something green in it most days and the book where she recorded the women, their complaints and her attempts to treat them but those had gone with her and he couldn’t imagine anyone looking for them. How long would it be before the hospital forgot she had once worked among them? 

The candle in the lamp was short, mostly melted. It would not give him light for very long and the night would be moonless. He opened the letter as clumsily as Dr. Hale made his initial incision and began to read

> Dear Mr. Diggs,
> 
> You must let me apologize for the unusual address with which this letters begins. I do not like to presume about the nature of our connection but it is such that I find I am compelled to write to you from Washington City. For myself, I could not call you other than a friend, from the moment of my arrival at Mansion House to the sad day of my departure, but I fear I have not been a friend to you or at the very least, not the friend you deserve. I have been remiss in expressing my appreciation of your abilities and in serving you as you so readily serve all others; I have not taken action as I might have to ensure your needs and aspirations were attended to and I am deeply sorry for it. 
> 
> None of us can say what the future holds. It is God’s will that shall be done but I feel certain He expects us to help Him, through our own merits and by recognition of those closest to us. I have not forgotten what Dr. Foster offered you and I believe that even at a distance, I may remind him but I hope you will accept a gift I should have given you long ago. My late husband had an extensive collection of scientific texts and I have made arrangements to send several of them to you in Alexandria. I had considered Gray’s Anatomy, but I cannot see what benefit it would be to you except as a doorstop. Do not feel you must share the books with Miss Jenkins. I have contacted the Freedman’s Society to send her what is needed for her school. These books are too advanced now for any but you and it would give me the greatest satisfaction to envision what you will make of them.
> 
> Oh, this must be brief. The fever plagues me still and forces me to choose only the most important words. I thank you for your kindness, your patience, your honesty and your constant, thoughtful care. May God bless you and keep you safe all your days, my comrade, my teacher, my friend.
> 
> With the greatest gratitude,
> 
> Mary von Olnhausen

Samuel held the letter in his hand. He’d never heard of anything like it. It was the most generous letter he could imagine and it made him feel lonelier than he ever had. Mary had set him apart and there was no way to correct her. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He had not liked the look of her when she left but he’d known he could not keep her in Alexandria if Jed Foster hadn’t managed it. She would not expect a letter in return and it might not reach her in time. But he would write her and tell her of Charlotte’s school, her clock and her canvas ward, and how Dr. Foster’s gait was steady and his hands as well, without any trembling. And he would address the letter to his Friend and hope that she could open her eyes to see it.


End file.
